As a consultant I have seen how, in many organizations, the configuration management database (CMDB) is always one of two things – an ideal fantasy, or a real nightmare. From my experience, if you start early and clearly establish the foundation of what to include and a strategy for how to manage it, your CMDB can be a valuable tool for the business for years to come.

What is a CMDB?

The CMDB is a database used to store configuration records, or configuration items (CIs), throughout their lifecycle. At a functional level, the CMDB provides a means of understanding the organization’s critical assets and their relationships, such as information systems, parent sources or dependencies of assets, and the child relationships of assets.

To remain agile and proactive, organizations need their CMDB to take on a bigger role—it should allow them to understand different environments and make real-time decisions around infrastructure problems and changes. This matured CMDB can move from a repository used for manually tracking assets to a full configuration management system (CMS) capable of maintaining one or more CMDBs that in turn store attributes of CIs—relating to incidents, problems, changes, and releases, as well as a myriad of other types of data and tools—and their relationships to other CIs.

The importance of a configuration management strategy

One challenge faced by every IT department is ensuring that the core services the company depends on stay up and running—and can recover quickly when they do go down. Outages and their time to resolution are directly impacted by the organization’s configuration management strategy. By knowing what’s present in your environment with your CMDB, you can control it, maintain it, and improve it. In fact, with the technology available today, you can not only account for all IT assets but also provide a sound basis for incident management, problem management, change management, and release management. This drives operating costs lower, reduces the number of reported issues, and facilitates faster issue identification.

A solid strategy understands that a CMDB isn’t limited to storing CIs and their relationships. When you choose a CMDB strategy, you’re often not limited in what you can store in CMDB extended data. Also, the types of CIs and relationships in your CMDB must be capable of changing, so you need a data model that is extensible. You should be able to add and remove attributes from your classes, and even add and remove classes or types of configuration items that can be stored in the CMDB. An object-oriented data model has a hierarchical set of classes where each class inherits attributes from the class above it in the hierarchy, called a superclass—and then adds its own attributes to create a more specific type of object, a subclass. Subclasses can have their own subclasses, extending the hierarchy to whatever level of detail you want to track. Though this feature is important, I would suggest that you should take care not to overuse it. The CMDB should hold only CIs and their relationships for critical configuration items. Adding classes and attributes for non-required CIs will needlessly tax your CMDB, which can negatively impact performance. Also, sub-classing too far can leave you with classes so narrowly defined that they have very few members. Balance the need for categorization with the need to store similar CIs together.

CMDB Best Practice in Action

To give you a better sense of how strategy and CMDB best practice can have positive impacts on your service management, I’ve summarized two customer examples below. Hopefully, from them you can see a path forward for your organization

Customer example #1: Adjusting and Cleansing an Existing CMDB

Recently, we revamped and cleansed a financial service company’s CMDB by adhering to CMDB best practices. These adjustments were necessary because the CMDB had data that was repetitive—appearing in multiple classes and subclasses. It also created a maintenance nightmare when these attributes needed to be modified. Initially, when they started using their CMDB, instead of grouping their CIs and organizing them in similar classes, they decided to create individual classes and subclasses for each type of asset. To repair this, we removed a few subclasses that were miscategorized because they existed as a subclass while the class already had most of the attributes for the subclass. We handled this by adding the required attributes in the parent class and re-architecting the CMDB strategy to utilize attributes that stored similar data. We could now remove the subclasses that were no longer necessary. This limited the number of custom attributes required to store similar information.

While we were making these adjustments, we also established procedures to prepare the CMDB for future growth in case new types of assets are added to it and to avoid creating multiple sub-classes if it is not required. As part of this future planning, we helped the customer create and enable a team of dedicated CMDB Administrators who enforce the processes we defined for mapping new types of assets in the CMDB. These procedures included guidelines around the type of asset and the expected class mapping that can be used to store the information. This made it possible to plan for decommissioning one of the in-house tools, maintain asset ownership, improve cost center billing, and add efficiency all within the CMDB because this data was migrated and stored in the CMDB with existing integrations that updated it nightly. By making the CMDB the single source of truth for all assets, the customer is able to run Operations more efficiently. The customer not only reduced their spend by decommissioning the in-house tool but also created a robust CMDB. With it, they can control change lifecycles to mitigate risks to their IT services. With the ability to perform impact assessments for any change against the infrastructure, they can determine the true impact to the assets.

With the CMDB in place, the potential risk of downtime and asset unavailability is easily visible, enabling the Change Advisory Board to make more informed decisions around actions like delaying change requests that lack backout plans and outage windows. The result is fewer outages and incidents.

Customer example #2: Utilizing the CMDB to Support Asset and Application Licensing

An oil & gas customer had a home-grown tracking tool they were using for Asset and Application Licensing. The tool was designed to be a repository of assets that were tracked manually. Application licenses were manually tracked based on installation requests from end users. This is how the customer described the challenging situation they found themselves in:

Visibility into our IT infrastructure was limited because asset data was scattered across the organization. Some of the data was stored in spreadsheets but often it existed only in the heads of veteran staffers. We didn’t have a clear picture of what resources we had, where they were located, who owned them, and how they related to each other. Consequently, we couldn’t follow best practices for managing incidents, identifying and resolving recurring problems, or rolling out changes quickly and reliably. Nor could we readily assess the risks that a change might have on the rest of the environment.

In this situation, we first transitioned the customer to a CMDB (specifically BMC Helix CMDB) and utilized CMDB best practices. Once we completed populating the CMDB, the oil & gas company quickly saw the value that provided around ownership tracking, cost center billing, asset tracking (including applications installed on assets, like servers, desktops, laptops, and smartphones), asset support, and asset lifecycle history.

In addition to an improved CMDB, the oil & gas company needed to expand their use of the CMDB to reduce risks presented by software licenses that aren’t centrally tracked by automating notifications of expirations. To achieve a system that could also give them visibility into handling their software license agreements and license models, we recommended connecting their CMDB to Flexera FlexNet Manager Suite, a BMC strategic partner’s tool. We made this recommendation because it would add the following critical capabilities leveraging the CMDB and thus ensure the oil & gas company knew what software license agreements they had, who owned them, and when they were up for renewal in order to remain compliant and reduce the risk of incurring fines and other issues:

• Automated discovery and analysis of the application across all assets
• License repository tracking and updates based on usage
• Increased license compliance to reduce software audit risk
• End-to-end software lifecycle management
• Reporting for consolidation and vendor management

They gained software license optimization maturity by pairing Flexera with BMC Helix Discovery and BMC Helix CMDB for a framework to store the information and create relationships with existing CIs. This reduced the number of instances where they might be out of compliance or over-subscribed to an application licensing agreement.

As you can see, a well-planned and implemented CMDB enables your IT team to manage critical IT business processes with ease. Even further, with a strategy in place to mature your CMDB, it will make it possible to run and reinvent your IT. Even further, by combining your CMDB strategy with complementary software license management and a comprehensive asset management solution, you can optimize all aspects of your hardware, software, and network resources to streamline IT and business operations, allowing you to deliver solutions for key IT processes. The dream of providing the best quality data to your business via a KPI-driven user experience is possible with CMDB best practices. With a mature CMDB in place, just think about the benefits you and your organization can achieve with all the information now at your disposal whenever you need it.

If you can use assistance with your CMDB strategy, contact BMC Customer Success and speak to one of our experts.

Whether you’re a business executive or a seasoned IT pro, using managed services can make your job easier. When effectively executed, a Managed Service (MS) is like gaining the capability of an IT Department with the expertise of seasoned professionals to deliver focused application operations to your company’s business application users.

Let’s take a look at Managed Services to see when and how they can benefit your company.

What is a managed service?

Simply put, an MS is designed to handle the daily operations of your specialized applications. A managed services can:

• Provide more capability to your company end-users
• Allow in-house IT to focus on more strategic IT programs
• Free your team to focus on your business’ core competencies

This shows up often when IT professionals notice a decline in the current repository of knowledge, reducing the quality of IT service to your company. Other symptoms of a need for an MS include following:

• “We didn’t achieve everything we wanted last year due to a lack of Service and Support.”
• “We had too many service outages and downtime.”
• “We overspent our budget on tweaks to our business applications that eroded its performance.”
• “We lost data due to lack of ability with the solution.”

From my experience working with small and large client companies alike, I often suggest how a managed service can help address these challenges. In my career, I have worked with many clients that are utilizing managed services in a variety of ways. Most recently, I provided a managed service to a large energy company which found the service to be seamless and significantly improved the satisfaction of end users and IT support staff, globally.

If you’re sensing some of these dynamics at your company, here are some personnel and technology suggestions on how you can reorganize and empower your IT Department for growth via MS.

Assessing the need for managed services

Today, IT managers are under significant pressure to meet the performance, operational expectations, and security needs of the business—all while trying to keep costs down. Most financial experts would suggest in these conditions to switch to a predictable cost model, like that of a managed service.

A company that provides such services is called a Managed Service Provider (MSP). The best time to consider speaking with a MSP is when you are:

• Setting future strategic goals
• Deploying new services to your IT environment

Many times, your existing staff may not be experienced with a new technology or able to maintain new services or applications. You could hire contractors to provide the service. But, given a static or declining budget, this may be more expensive and provide less value in supporting your company’s ever-growing performance goals. This is often true for small, medium, and large companies alike.

Managed Service models have evolved over time, and the seasoned providers have perfected their delivery. It is very effective for businesses that:

• Rely on their IT infrastructure to properly support their daily business processes
• Do not have sufficiently trained staff or time to formally deal with proper maintenance, updates, and repairs
• Want to pay one monthly, flat fee for services to provide a high level of service quality to the business

For most business services, IT underpins the business engine. From software to hardware and the skills required to keep the service running, a company could invest significant capital in building and maintaining the in-house support staff.

However, given the maturity of the managed service models and the shift to virtualization and cloud, the need for on-site IT staff can be limited to the exceptions where operational sensitivity justifies it. A company may consider leveraging managed service experts in order to ensure greater IT cost predictability amid uncertain requirements

Costs for MSPs

MSPs usually price their services on a subscription basis. Based on the services selected, the pricing is usually scoped on the number of devices with pricing aligned to packages across a range of categories.

Some provide customer support on-site when required. Basic services often start with a monitoring service, which identifies potential issues, which you resolve on your own. At the other end of the spectrum, service providers offer comprehensive managed services that cover everything from alerts through problem resolution.

Benefits of Managed Services

Managed services offer a variety of benefits.

Better cost control

Cost factors for a business service depend on an organization’s requirement for availability and criticality of a particular service.

The typical cost components of an IT department, including training, equipment and personnel, are absorbed by the MSP and presented as a fixed monthly charge to the company. This helps in effectively predicting costs every month when budgeting. Depending on the future requirements and the speed of the your organization’s IT maturity, the managed service can scale to address such scenarios.

The biggest benefit is that a company can decide how much to scale based on factors that may include finance and the CIO’s strategic vision. IT Service interruptions and outages can also be prevented, thus mitigating the risk of further losses. In terms of the energy company, the client went from multiple daily outages to one scheduled outage a month.

Improved risk management

Every business carries a certain amount of risk. This can be minimized by lowering the individual risk involved with each business service identified as critical. A MSP can help reduce risk by contributing their own proprietary methodologies and access to modern infrastructure and software. This enables adherence to best practices and minimizes risk involved in the service delivery.

The MSP assumes and manages much of the risk for the company it serves by:

• Having specific industry knowledge, especially around security and compliance issues
• Partnering with your business and guide you on the best way to avoid risk in your domains of expertise

High availability, efficiency & productivity

For an IT Service, the saying “time is money” always applies. For optimal company performance, constant availability of a mission-critical IT services are the top priority for many organizations.

Assessing the true cost of downtime is hard. But you can take proactive steps to avoid it completely. At worst, reputational risk could be a factor when the outage comes to the attention of those outside the company potentially eroding public trust.

Clients experience better performance with minimal downtime when using a managed service. Many times, mission-critical applications involve multiple technologies and require them to be fully operational and integrated to achieve the IT service expected. All component applications must be available together for the IT service to function seamlessly for internal end-users. A MSP can ensure maximum uptime and minimal service interruptions.

Organizations that attempt to implement and support all IT services in-house usually have:

• Much higher research and development (R&D) costs
• Longer timelines to deploy

Because of this higher cost, you’re likely passing it on to your service consumers.

By contrast, the MSP is highly efficient in delivering IT services in a way that keeps costs low and the time to deploy short while providing a high-quality service to the business.

Future-proofing IT services

IT departments will always have funding, technical, security, and operational challenges. As you look for strategies to minimize spend, I have seen many organizations effectively utilize AMS to achieve the full benefit of seamless service integration with less worry over resource constraints.

MSPs will always have their staff trained on upcoming and new releases as well as new technologies with the ability to lock-in costs for a multi-year period. By creating more predictability, your business will reduce operational risk and challenges and minimize service disruption.

Managed service best practices

Managed Service Providers are the best of both worlds:

• MSPs bring practical delivery of a predictable service model and cost to quickly and effectively deliver new IT service to your company
• MSPs also enhance the stability and peace of mind for IT and business leaders alike

The task of delivering new business services to the enterprise while keeping costs controlled is a difficult task in the modern business environment. A managed service is a great strategy to help your IT organization be highly resilient, and cost predictable, fiscal year to fiscal year.

MSPs complement and do not replace existing staff but rather free those valuable resources to lead and deliver on the strategic IT programs necessary to advance business goals. In larger organizations, an MSP will help your resources to focus on more strategic projects. You can rest assured that your company is minimizing the risks associated with maintaining client data and sensitive competitive information and more with today’s managed service offerings.

BMC for managed services

As you embark on investing in a new application, consider taking advantage of various managed service offerings to stay on top of IT business needs and minimize unsystemic risks. If you are considering a BMC technology investment, please fill out our ContactMe form to speak with someone about our MS options.

Related reading

• BMC Business of IT Blog
• Guide to IT Cost Management, a series of articles
• Insourcing vs Outsourcing IT Services: Comparing Your Options
• IT Organization Metrics & KPIs: A Well-Rounded Approach
• SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS: What’s The Difference & How To Choose